The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination Quotes

“Russell is reputed at a dinner party once to have said, ‘Oh, it is useless talking about inconsistent things, from an inconsistent proposition you can prove anything you like.’ Well, it is very easy to show this by mathematical means. But, as usual, Russell was much cleverer than this. Somebody at the dinner table said, 'Oh, come on!’ He said, 'Well, name an inconsistent proposition,’ and the man said, 'Well, what shall we say, 2 = 1.’ 'All right,’ said Russell, 'what do you want me to prove?’ The man said, 'I want you to prove that you’re the pope.’ 'Why,’ said Russell, 'the pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the pope and I are one.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols in it. And all the difficult paradoxes which go right back to Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“You cannot love the girl without being conscious of the fact that she has yellow hair, you cannot see the world without the intervention of the physical senses.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“We become more and more aware that what we think about the world is not what the world is but what the human animal sees of the world.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“The new theory, of course, always subsumes more effects than the old. But the remarkable thing is that when it is discovered, it also wholly changes our conception of how the world works.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“We cannot separate the special importance of the visual apparatus of man from his unique ability to imagine, to make plans, and to do all the other things which are generally included in the catchall phrase "free will." What we really mean by free will, of course, is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. In my view, which not everyone shares, the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“But it is of critical importance to ask ourselves what features which other animals do not possess have given human beings the very special capacities with which we are concerned in these lectures: the ability to utter cognitive sentences (which no other animal can do) and the ability therefore to exercise knowledge and imagination.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“[When] we practice science (and this is true of all our experience), we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination